Alessandra Bajec -
IMEMC -
"Dheisheh camp was set up in 1949 as a temporary site for 3,000 refugees coming from 46 villages, west of Jerusalem and Hebron, destroyed in the 1948 war. Today Dheisheh remains home to around 13,000 people living on less than 1/2 square kilometre straining an always incomplete infrastructure."

Karl Vick - Yahoo!News - "Yeah, I`m sick of parties, too. That`s why we all agree at the end of the day Fatah didn`t serve us, Hamas didn`t serve us […] All their energy became about protecting the movement thing, not the Palestine thing. So we should step up and say, `Look at something bigger than your political interest.` As long as they`re divided, it will be like, well, like it is: Palestine is not Palestine. It`s Gaza and the West Bank"

Breaking the Silence – reported actions include tours to Hebron and the South Hebron Hills and the monitoring of home demolitions and harassment of Palestinian residents, new eye-winess soldiers` testimonies, the opening of photo exhibitions in Hebron and Stockholm, participation at the J Street Conference in Washington, and a response to a Knesset committee asking BTS to help with official Israeli international PR (“As long as the Occupation is real, it will also be virtually mirrored on the Internet”).

Moises Salinas-Fleitman & Theodore Bikel - Meretz USA - American Jews, in order to express their support for the brave Israeli citizens refusing to cooperate with settlement policy, should refuse to purchase any goods or services, including tourism services, made in or by the settlements.

by Ramzy Baroud -
Al-Ahram
"The global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and other related campaigns were aimed at exposing Israeli transgressions against the Palestinian people and galvanising international solidarity. What is so uplifting is to see how their achievements have far surpassed these initial aims. The campaigns have animated, accentuated and actually legitimised Palestinian civil society -- a notion that long stood outside the official paradigm acceptable to Israel, and which had very little space within the restrictive realm of the Palestinian Authority (PA)." ca

Joharah Baker - Bitterlemons - For those young Palestinians who endured beatings in Gaza and those who were on hunger strike at Ramallah`s Manara Square, the news of a possible reconciliation is a burst of fresh air. Too early to predict just how sincere the parties are, it is not too early to appreciate the movement of the masses. Palestinians have made mistakes, they have followed their political affiliations blindly at times, but the bottom line is that they all want their leaders united.

David Sheen - Haaretz - Abdallah Abu Rahmah was given a hero`s welcome in the West Bank village of Bil`in after being released from Ofer Prison on Monday. He was greeted by over a hundred and fifty townsfolk who escorted him home waving flags and letting off fireworks in his honor.

Women Living Under Muslim Law - "The law regulating entry into Israel is illegal and should not be obeyed. As a group of women practicing civil disobedience, we will continue to work to destabilize the system of military decrees and regulations that make the life of our," said writer and translator Ilana Hammerman in an unprecedented women’s conference in the West Bank, celebrating civil disobedience. Palestinian friends and their families unbearable

Yariv Oppenheimer - Peace Now - The attempt to link this terrorist act to the positions of the Israeli peace camp is irresponsible and is intended to incite the public towards violence against the left.

Shuki Sadeh - Haaretz - The move comes in the wake of public pressure in Denmark following a report from the Coalition of Women for Peace, which runs the "Who Profits?" project monitoring Israeli companies operating in the territories.

Congress of South African Trade Unions [...] - AIC - "COSATU supports the call from students, academics and numerous prominent individuals, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for UJ to terminate its apartheid-era relationship with Israel`s BGU, a university that actively collaborates with the Israeli Defence Force in its enforcement of apartheid occupation against Palestinians, by offering special privileges and services to the army"

Video of a solidarity demonstration with Al Arakib and tree planting action to replace the trees that the Israeli authorities have had uprooted. Al Arakib is a Bedouin village that the Israel Lands Authority has demolished 20 times these past months, and on which the Jewish National Funds intends to plant a forest. The villagers refuse to leave, and keep on rebuilding and putting up tents after every demolition.

Triodos Bank -
"Belgian bank Dexia has been excluded from the Triodos sustainable investment universe because of its ongoing financing of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories."
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David Shulman - There are two large wells on the hill—hence its name, al-Tawamin, "the Twins." We also know that these wells belong to the Palestinians; we`ve come here before to help our friends from Bir el-`Id and elsewhere draw water and fill tankers. We mention this to the major and, somewhat surprisingly, he at once agrees that the wells are indeed Palestinian and that Palestinians have the right to take water from them. Good, we say, we want to water the herds now. No, he says, you can`t do that. Why is that? Because, although the wells indeed belong to Palestinians, the area surrounding them, including the high ridge and slope where we are standing, are off limits to Palestinians. They could, he says, in theory, draw water from the wells, if they could somehow manage to approach them, but they definitely can`t bring their sheep there to drink.

Jesse Bacon - The Only Democracy - At the same JStreet conference, lawyer Michael Sfard of Yesh Din reminded us that there are hundreds of Palestinians arrested every week for nonviolent protest, and now the same criminalization has spread to Jewish Israelis. I am struck by the courage of the people who stand up to the theft of settlers when Barack Obama won’t, and how sad that the sincere solidarity people around the world felt for the Egyptian protesters is now apparently a crime.

B’Tselem - Newsletter - Israeli Channel 10 TV aired yesterday footage filmed by Nariman and Bilal a-Tamimi, volunteers in B’Tselem’s video project and residents of Nabi Saleh, offering a rare glimpse into a new method employed by the army: soldiers enter homes at night to photograph youngsters from the village. The soldiers enter the homes and demand that every child and youth over the age of 10 be wakened. They then photograph the minors and leave. B’Tselem knows of at least four incursions of this kind during January 2011.

Jon Basil Utley -
Antiwar -
"Several members of Congress thanked J Street for presenting its case and giving those concerned for Israel’s long-term viability another position than that of AIPAC’s pro-occupation and settlement-expansion promotions."

Coalition to Save Lifta: In the given situation that the village of Lifta is an abandoned village and its original inhabitants live as refugees at a distance of only a few hundred metres from their village, it would have been befitting to abstain from all construction in the area and certainly to prevent building that would result in destruction of the village and the complete dispossession of the rights of the original inhabitants of the place.

Joseph Dana and Jesse Rosenfeld - Le Monde Diplomatique - As protests multiply across the Arab world and grassroots resistance grows in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority faces popular anger for its investment in a failed ‘peace process’

Saed Bannoura - IMEMC News - "In his letter, released Sunday, supporting the boycott, Waters wrote that in his view, `the abhorrent and draconian control that Israel wields over the besieged Palestinians in Gaza, and the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, coupled with its denial of the rights of refugees to return to their homes in Israel, demands that fair minded people around the world support the Palestinians in their civil, nonviolent resistance`"

Philip Weiss -Mondoweiss -
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The good news from the J Street conference is that the organization made it a point to include the Jewish left, non-Zionist Palestinian solidarity activists, and this opening will have important consequences for Jewish life if not for the future of the Middle East...J Street is doing great things by liberating American Jews from their servitude to nationalism. While I hope this makes a difference in the struggle for Palestinian freedom, that struggle is likely to require greater daring and imagination.
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The Academic and Cultural Boycott is an effective way of putting pressure on Israel and has a real chance of obtaining a change in the policies that contravene International Law; this was made clear in the case of South Africa. Israel clearly needs political legitimacy and moral recognition and the world of culture should not satisfy this need. For all of the reasons given in this letter we urge you to cancel your concert in Israel. As an outstanding and respected international figure in the world of music you can contribute to obtaining freedom, justice and a just peace in Palestine.
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Max Blumenthal - I just want to take a moment in appreciation of J Street for including this discussion at the conference. It is the most important conversation, in my mind, that we can have at this moment, and I thank you for having it. I want to take a moment to make sure we all are clear about what BDS is. BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. It’s a Palestinian led, globally active, non-violent movement in support of equality and freedom for the Palestinian people.

Hossam el-Hamalawy - Electronic Intifada - Only after the Palestinian intifada broke out in September 2000 did tens of thousands of Egyptians take to the streets in protest -- probably for the first time since 1977. Although those demonstrations were in solidarity with the Palestinians, they soon gained an anti-regime dimension, and police showed up to quell the peaceful protests. The president, however, remained a taboo subject, and I rarely heard anti-Mubarak chants.

Adam Keller -
Crazy Country -
"Now, there is also the "Prohibition of Boycotts Act, 2010", a bill which the Knesset Judicial Committee approved for its First Reading. It includes draconian punishments of all who call for a boycott against the settlements."

MIFTAH - Thirty-five years ago, six Palestinians from the Galilee in what is now northern Israel lost their lives in a bid to protect their land from confiscation. Today, Palestinians everywhere commemorate what has come to be known as Land Day.

Susan Koppelman and Nidal Hatim -
EI -
"Palestinians are limited to merely 17 percent of the water under the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, even though more than 80 percent of the rain that recharges the shared groundwater falls over the West Bank."